Michael Moore and Honesty

Turning the tables on Michael Moore

By Michelle Malkin · March 10, 2007 04:42 PM

What goes around, comes around. A new documentary unmasking Michael Moore debuts today at the South by Southwest film festival:

The cameras get turned on Michael Moore for a change at the South by Southwest film festival, where the documentary Manufacturing Dissent will have its world premiere.
The film from directors Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk, playing March 10 at the Austin festival, follows Moore during the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 and questions many of his tactics.
Among its revelations: that the confrontational documentarian did interview former General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, the elusive subject of his 1989 debut Roger & Me, and simply chose to leave it out of the finished cut.

Moore, who won an Academy Award for 2002's Bowling for Columbine, has not responded to e-mail and phone requests for comment.

"The people who can attest to this are extremely credible and do attest to this in the film," said John Pierson, the independent film veteran who helped sell Roger & Me to Warner Bros. and now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. "I've always loved Roger & Me. I loved working on it. I really believed in it, and that's really bad. The fundamental core of the film is how his mission to get Roger Smith fails and, P.S., Michael spent 18 years since then swearing he never interviewed Roger Smith."

More details:
In "Manufacturing Dissent" Caine and Melnyk — whose previous films include "Junket Whore," about movie journalists, and "Citizen Black," about Conrad Black — note that the scene in "Fahrenheit 9/11" in which President George W. Bush greets "the haves, and the have-mores" took place at the annual Al Smith Dinner, where politicians traditionally make sport of themselves. Melnyk and Caine received a video of the speeches from the dinner's sponsor, the Archdiocese of New York. "Al Gore later answers a question by saying, 'I invented the Internet,'" Caine said. "It's all about them making jokes at their own expense."

For once, Michael Moore has no comment.